These are the exhibits that Germaine Greer once warned would leave a visitor "profoundly depressed by yet more evidence that, for centuries, women have been kept busy wasting their time". In the gallery of London's Sir John Soane's Museum, displayed beneath reverential lighting to counter tone damage, is a freshly curated collection of the botanical collages of twice-widowed Georgian gentlewoman Mary Delany. The delicately crafted renderings of field bindweed, lily of the valley and ladies' slipper comprise a small part of some thousand paper mosaics which Delany eventually privately published in encyclopaedic form in 1781, to acclaim from both the scientific and artistic cognoscenti of the time. Sir Joshua Reynolds and the botanist Joseph Banks were among her greatest champions.
And yet, exquisite as her embroidered firescreens still are, two centuries hence Delany's amateur artistry is – so Greer would aver – to be treated with suspicion. Time-consuming decoupage and repetitive stitching seem but an exemplar of the kind of sedentary, indoor, anti-intellectual activity employed back then to inculcate a state of passive femininity and circumscribe within the domestic realm even the most copiously serviced woman. Seldom did an individual of that era succeed in breaking through the limiting expectations of domestic competence to enjoy her brief impingement on public life, as Delany did.
Of course, well-heeled Englishwomen are no longer educated solely in the direction of homely aptitude. Nonetheless, their aspiration towards such an apparent state of grace remains closely monitored. A modern-day Mrs Delany may not be instructed in the vicissitudes of needlecraft from birth, but it is likely she will encounter a surfeit of disquisitions on the icing of a cupcake. Women's success in the domestic sphere has at once remained eminently dismissable, proving lack of ambition or ability to gain public note, and become oddly valorised as a contemporary curtsey to what ladies really ought to be concerning themselves with.
In her book Living Dolls, Natasha Walter charts the resurgence in gendered evolutionary theory to explain men and women's allegedly varying dexterity as regards domestic labour and caring for children. Biological determinism, popularised via the prism of an unrigorous and often politically conservative media, is now presented as a taboo-busting blow to feminist orthodoxy. And it fits all too neatly with the Cath Kidston-spawned commercial profile of the domestically perfectable 1950s housewife. Modern working women don't enjoy – or resent – the imposed solitude that afforded Mary Delany the hours to complete her feminine craft, but they can now buy in the necessary accoutrements, whether motivated by nostalgia or guilt. The reality of domestic labour is tedious grind coupled with, in the case of child-rearing at least, unknowable private satisfaction; but the marketplace version of homespun femininity is all about display.
While Nigella Lawson may lace her domestic goddess status with irony, the insinuation that long-ago adaptations can explain or indeed justify inequality is a dangerous one. It's a trend that finds its unlikely corollary in our hypersexualised public culture which sells the mainstreaming of porn, pole-dancing and plastic surgery back to women as evidence of free choice and empowerment. Both the sanctification of housewifely charms and the approbation of sexual availability are based on an exaggerated, almost fatalistic, version of femininity that denies individual difference among women and, crucially, casts men only as consumers or avoiders.
While an angry debate about the pornification of contemporary culture is well worth having, it is notable that male contributions are generally limited to unrepresentative punters on rate-a-hooker websites. Consistent in the coverage generated by last week's government review of the sexualisation of children was the absence of any committed examination of the effect on boys, although there was plenty to suggest they are just as demeaned. Similarly, when discussion returns to the domestic, the template of the publicly heroic, privately hapless Alpha Male trumps all: witness Alastair Campbell who, his ever-indulgent wife revealed this week, could help start an illegal war but not a vacuum cleaner.
Despite the advances women have made into the public realm, it would seem our conception of the middle-class domestic sphere has changed little from Mrs Delany's time: a uniquely feminine space, replete with menial tasks to be outsourced according to our means and socially significant crafts to be executed with élan. Nowhere do men have traction, nor does the recognition that studied domesticity won't come naturally to all women.
The trouble with this inability to redefine the domestic is that it comes at a time when feminist discourse seems to locate itself increasingly in the personal, whether that's sexuality, childcare or the "pinkification" of girls' clothing. Though feminism has always, rightly, argued that the personal is political, this risks a scenario where the tough stuff like equal pay gets a nod rather than a movement. Taken together, the focus on hypersexuality and confected domesticity delineate ever more stringently what women's – and not men's – interests should be. The Mumsnet election or next week's women-only Question Time are all very well, but they don't signal progress if they fail to encourage women to raise their heads above the domestic parapet, or include men in a conversation many of them are desperate to have.